From silva dimes to po-boys, r-lessness has long been a conspicuous featureof all dialects of New Orleans English. This dissertation presents aquantitative and qualitative description of current rates of r-lessness inthe city. 71 speakers from 21 neighborhoods were interviewed.R-pronunciation was elicited in four contexts: interview chat, Katrinanarratives, a reading passage and a word list. R-lessness was found in 39%of possible instances. Older speakers pronounce /-r/ less than youngerspeakers, and those with a high school education or less pronounce /-r/ farless than those with post-secondary education. Race and gender did notprove to be significant predictors of r-pronunciation. In contrast to paststudies, many speakers in the current study discuss their metalinguisticawareness of /-r/ and their partial control of /-r/ variation, discussingswitching between r-fulness and r-lessness in different contexts. In NewOrleans, this metalinguistic awareness is attributable in part to thedevastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thenear-disappearance of the city intensified an already extant nostalgia forlocal culture, including ways of speaking. Nostalgia and amplification byadvertisers and popular media have helped recontextualize r-lessness as avariable associated with a number of social meanings, including localnessand authenticity. These processes help transform r-lessness, for manyspeakers, from a routine feature of talk to a floating cultural variable,serving as a semiotic resource on which speakers can draw on to performlocalness. This dissertation both closes a gap in research on New Orleansspeech and uses New Orleans as a case study to suggest that the socialmeanings of linguistic features are created and maintained in part by aconstellation of interrelated social processes of late modernity. Further,I argue that individual speakers are increasingly agentively engaged withthese larger processes, as part of a global transformation from moretraditional, place-bound populations to more deracinated individuals whochoose to align themselves with particular communities and local culturalforms, particularly those that have been commodified.